David Malcolm Part 15

She asked me what I had been doing all these years. I laughed joyfully, but I did not tell her. For all these years I had been working for this moment!

"What have I been doing?" I said. "Why, Penelope, it would take me forever to tell you."

"You must begin telling me right now," she returned quickly. "You must walk home with me to tea and I can hear all about it as we go. To me it seems just yesterday since we went fishing in the meadow. Mrs.

Bannister won't mind driving back alone--will you, Mrs. Bannister?"

Mrs. Bannister did mind it very much. She was, I learned afterward, introducing Miss Blight to the right people, and it was a violation of her contract with Rufus Blight to allow his niece to walk in the public eye with a man who might not be the kind of a person Miss Blight should be seen with at a time when her whole future depended on her following the narrow way which leads to the social heaven. Of course she would not mind driving home alone, but what about the hats? Mr. Malcolm would pardon her mentioning such intimate domestic matters, but Miss Blight had been away all summer and had not a hat of any kind fit to be seen in.

"Bother the hats!" said Miss Blight.

She laid a hand on her chaperon's arm and pushed her gently into the carriage. Mrs. Bannister made feeble protests. Penelope was the most wilful girl she had ever seen and knew perfectly well that she had not a thing to wear to the Perkins tea; if she had to go home she objected to being arrested this way and clapped into a prison van. The last was hurled at us as the footman was closing the door, and when Mrs.

Bannister fell back in the seat, angry and silent, the Pomeranian projected his head from the window and snapped at us.

"Mrs. Bannister is a good soul," Penelope said when, side by side, we were away on that wonderful walk uptown. "She has to be properly handled though or I should be her slave. Her husband was a broker, or something like that, and died during a panic, and as she was in straitened circ.u.mstances she came to us. You see, she knows everybody, and is awfully well connected. You must be very nice to her, David."

She called me David as naturally as though it really had been yesterday that we went fishing in the meadow. My heart beat quicker. I laughed aloud for the sheer joy of living in the same world with her. I vowed that I should be very nice indeed to Mrs. Bannister. Had Penelope asked me to be very nice to her friend Medusa I should have given her my pledge. Subtly, by her admonition, she had conveyed to me the promise that this walk was to be but the first of many walks, the rambles of our childhood over again, but grown older and wiser and more sedate. Under what other circ.u.mstances could I be nice to Mrs.

Bannister?

Having settled my line of conduct toward the martial woman with the Pomeranian, I began my account of the years missing in our friendship.

It was very brief. It is astonishing in how few words a man can sum up his life's accomplishment if he holds to the essential facts. Since that day when she had left the farm with Rufus Blight I had studied under Mr. Pound, spent four years in college and three years working on a newspaper. Was I successful in my work? she asked. Fairly so, I answered modestly. I might have told her that I had gone ahead a little faster than my fellows, but even then seemed to advance at a snail's pace to petty conquests, for if at the end of years I attained to Hanks's place, I was beginning to doubt that it was worth the pains which I was taking to win it. I did not tell her of the ambitions which had led me into my profession, nor how all my fine ideas had been early dissipated and I had settled down to a struggle for mere existence. On one essential fact, too, was I silent. It arose to my mind as I told my brief story and it spread like a cloud darkening this brightest of my days. You know what the shadow was. By her absence, by her remoteness, Gladys Todd had for me a shadow's unreality. At this moment the tie between us was so attenuated that it was hard for me to believe that it existed at all. I knew that it did exist, but I could not surrender myself to be bound by so frail a thread. I was silent. Childlike, I wished the clouds away. Royally, I commanded the sea to stand back.

"And you--what have you been doing all these years?" I asked, turning suddenly to Penelope.

"Just growing up," she answered, laughing. "It's very easy to grow up when one has such a kind uncle as mine. You remember the poverty in which he found me. I was a mere charity child, and he took me----"

"To his lively, pushing town," said I.

"Yes," Penelope went on, "to a big stone house with a green lawn about it dotted with queer figures in iron and marble. They were the most beautiful things I had ever seen--those statues. Now they are all stored in the stable, for we grew up, uncle and I, even in matters of art. But it was like heaven to me then, after the mountains and the smoky cabin, after the clearing and the weeds----"

"After our farm," I broke in with a touch of irony, "and to ride behind the fast trotters compared with our farm wagon----"

"David," returned Penelope in a voice of reproach, "I have never forgotten the mountains, or the cabin, or the farm. In the first days away from them I was terribly homesick for them all. My uncle suffered for it. His patience and his kindness were unfailing, and he softened me at last. There is nothing in the world that I have wanted that he has not given me."

I was silent. The old boyish dislike of Rufus Blight had never died.

I could think of him only as a sleek, vulgar man who by the force of his money had taken Penelope from me. His money had raised her far above my reach, and even the cloud which shadowed this day which might have been my brightest seemed to have had its birth in vapors of his gold-giving furnaces. That I had forgotten Penelope and entangled myself in the cords of a foolish sentimentality I charged to him, and Penelope, seeing how I walked, silent, with eyes grimly set ahead, divined that I still nourished the aversion to which in my childish petulance I had given vent so long ago.

"You are still prejudiced against poor Uncle Rufus, I see," she said, smiling. "I remember how badly you treated him that day when he came to take me away."

"Yes, I never have forgiven him," I snapped out. "He may have reason, and justice, and saintliness on his side, yet I never can forgive him."

"Oh, yes, you can," said Penelope with an indulgent laugh. "You will when you come to know him as I do. You must, for my sake."

"Perhaps, for your sake," said I, relenting a little.

"I knew you would for my sake, David," said Penelope. "Why, I owe everything I have in the world to him. Since he has retired, sold his works to a trust, I think they call it, his whole life seems to be to look after me. Pittsburgh isn't much of a place for a man who has no business; so we thought we should try New York for a while, and we bought the house last spring and spent the summer in Bar Harbor. Now we are just settling down."

I was hardly listening as she spoke, for my mind was occupied by Rufus Blight. He had reason and justice on his side. That much I surrendered to him, but I clung obstinately to my dislike. I thought of the Professor flying over the clearing to the hiding of the mountains; I remembered him in the college hall, with his bitter words pointing the way from which his own weakness held him back, the man whose imagination ranged so far while his hands were idle. I pictured his brother grown fat and happy at the trough of gold at which he fed, and even had I not felt a personal feud with Rufus Blight, my sympathy for the under-dog must have aroused my antipathy. But I hated him for my own sake. For every foolish step that I had taken since that day when he had carried Penelope away the fault seemed to have been his as much as mine, and yet I was wise enough to see that if I would hold Penelope's regard it would be very rash to show by word or deed that I nursed any resentment.

"For your sake I will, Penelope," I said.

So soft and satisfied was the smile with which she rewarded me that I vowed to myself that I really would forgive my old archenemy. A moment before it had been on my lips to speak of my confiscated letters, for I had no doubt that Rufus Blight had intercepted them. Now I realized that in them was a mine which I might fire only to shatter our new-found friendship. That treachery, too, I said, I should forgive.

When Penelope set the light to the fuse, I with rare presence of mind stamped out the flames and prevented a disaster.

We had pa.s.sed Fiftieth Street, and I was telling her of my last visit home, of my father and mother, of Mr. Pound, and of all the friends of our younger days, when she suddenly turned to me. It was as though the question had for some time been hanging on her lips. "David, why did you never answer the letters I wrote you?"

"Because." I was playing for time. To carry out my plan of silence, it seemed that I must deceive her, and I hesitated to tell her an untruth.

"Because why?" she insisted.

"Because I never received them," I answered, cheered by the thought that thus far I could tell her the truth. "Did you really write to me?"

"Many times," she said; "until I got tired of writing and receiving no answer. You made me very angry."

"The letters must have been lost in the mail," said I, bent on keeping this disagreeable subject in the background. "Country post-offices are very careless in the way they handle things, and mine to you--my letters--must have gone astray too."

"Then you did write to me as you promised, David?" she exclaimed.

"Until I got tired of receiving no answer," I returned, laughing. "But of course it is too late to complain to the government now."

Penelope was not satisfied. Her brows were knitted. I believed that there lurked in her mind a suspicion that not the government alone was concerned in the interruption of that early correspondence, but I was determined to ignore a subject which, if too closely pressed, might bring about unpleasant consequences. The easiest way was to turn the trend of her thought with a bold question, which had been hanging on my lips through many blocks of the walk. And so, as casually as though I inquired of her about some distant friend or relative, I spoke of her father.

Penelope stopped short and laid a hand upon my arm. Then as suddenly she strode ahead.

"I know nothing of him, David," she said in a voice almost harsh. "I have not seen him since that dreadful day in the clearing. Once I heard from him--a few lines--but that was so long ago that at times I almost forget that I ever had a father."

"What did he write to you, Penelope?"

She seemed not to hear my question, for she was walking very fast, with her eyes set straight ahead of her. "He might pa.s.s me at this minute, David, and I should not know him. That might be he, standing by that window, and I should be none the wiser, yet the fault is his. I try always to think of him as I should, but at times it seems as though he had disowned me, abandoned me on his brother's doorstep and then run away. You ask of the letter. It came to me soon after I left the farm. He said that it was best that my uncle should have me, better than to condemn me to shift about the world with him; he said that he had been a lazy, worthless creature, but he was going to do something, to be somebody--those were his words; and some day, when I could be proud of him, he would come back and claim me, and, David, he has never come. Will he ever come, do you think?"

"I think he will," I answered. "For I have seen him."

"You have seen him!" The hand was on my arm again, and, forgetful of the hurrying crowd around us, we stood there face to face, while I told her of the brief glimpse I had had of him four years before. She listened, breathless, and, when I had finished, walked on in silence.

We were crossing the Plaza when she spoke again, half to me, half ruminating. "Poor father! He must have tried and failed. He was going to Tibet, David, you told me; that was four years ago. Where can he be now? Wandering around the world alone, in want, perhaps, and I have everything. Do you suppose he believes that I have forgotten him--as if I could forget those evenings when we sat together and painted pictures of the times when we should be rich! He called me the princess and planned great houses in which we should live, and he would talk of our travels and the wonderful places we should see together.

Even then I had faith that our dreams would come true, though it did seem that we were getting poorer and poorer all the time, and father doing nothing to help our plight. The dreams came true, David--for me.

Why doesn't he come and share them with me, with me and Uncle Rufus?

That is what troubles me; that is what I can never understand."

I said to myself that Rufus Blight, were he so minded, could clear the mystery away. I thought of him as a selfish, arrogant man, who was, perhaps, too well satisfied not to have an undesirable third person in his household to undertake any sincere search for his brother. But these thoughts I concealed. There was something behind it all that we two could not understand, I said, and Penelope looked up to me with clouded eyes.

"But we will find him, Penelope!" My stick hit the pavement as I registered a vow. "We will find him--you and I."

"How like the little David you are," she cried, and then smiling light broke through the clouded eyes. "We shall try to find him, anyway, shall we not--to bring father home. For look, David!" She had halted.

The small gloved hand was lifted, and the blue wings in her hat moved with an old-time majesty. "There is the palace we dreamed of!"

CHAPTER XVI